NASA Helping to Understand Water Flow in the West

To do their jobs, water resource managers in the Columbia River Basin have mostly relied on data from sparsely located ground stations among the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. But now, NASA and partnering agencies are going to provide United States Bureau of Reclamation water resource managers with high-resolution satellite data, allowing them to analyze up-to-date water-related information over large areas all at once.

The pilot program is now underway with the Rio Grande and Columbia River basins where water is scarce while demands range from hydropower, to farming, fishing, boating and protecting endangered species. Water resource managers in these areas grapple with the big money stakes of distributing a finite amount of water to many groups. NASA satellite data offer to fill the data gaps in mountainous and drought-ridden terrain, and new computer models let users quickly process that data.

Land Surface Models (LSMs) from NASA, other agencies and universities, and NASA satellite data can be used to determine snowpack, amounts of soil moisture, and the loss of water into the atmosphere from plants and the soil, a process known as evapotranspiration. Understanding these variables in the water cycle is a key to managing water in such resource-limited areas.

"The latest satellites provide so much up-to-date and wide-ranging data, which we can use in the models to monitor and better understand what is happening with the water cycle in these areas," said Kristi Arsenault, research associate for the Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS) team at Goddard and Research Associate at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

"These efforts are designed to improve the efficiency of the analysis and prediction of water supply and demand using the emerging technologies of the Land Data Assimilation System," said Dr. Dave Matthews, manager of the River Systems and Meteorology Group of the Technical Services Center, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation). Computer models, known as decision support systems, that factor in ecological, human, and legal restrictions are vital to managing and allocating water, Matthews added. These systems will incorporate NASA satellite and model data.

For more on the project to understanding the water flow in the west, go to: http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/2003/0717watermgr.html